


When Will We Find That We Know

by Masu_Trout



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Dancing, F/F, Post-Canon, Reunion Sex, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-08 16:34:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15934262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The courier returns to the Sierra Madre.





	When Will We Find That We Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gayporwave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayporwave/gifts).



Something the courier has learned through her decades in the Mojave: no one is self-sufficient. There are those who would claim to be, of course. The Legion, stealing the sweat and the blood of the eastern tribes and calling that strength; the Brotherhood, fearful and proud, desperately trying to hold back their inevitable slide into inbreeding; the NCR, steadfastly ignoring the corruption in their own ranks to present a united front. All of them are lying. (Most of them aren't even doing a very good job of it, either. She could teach them a thing or two about telling a convincing story.)

So when she gets one too many messages from Christine saying _I'm fine, things are going well, nothing to worry about_ —all of them sent via a radio broadcast that still makes her jump and press a hand to the side of her neck when she hears it—the Courier taps back, _I'm glad to hear that_ , and then she loads up a pair of securitrons with two months' worth of canned food and medical supplies and heads back out into the desert.

(Her advisors worry, of course. Not that there's any reason to. Yes Man hardly ever jokes about murder these days, and he even more rarely follows through on his cheery not-threats. He can hold the city down for a week.)

It's not until she's out on the open road, Pacienca slung across her back and Maria on her hip, the love of her life a distant neon-gleaming jewel against the horizon, that she realizes how much she's missed this. The sun hasn't risen yet, which means the air hasn't managed to get hot enough to fry her like a cracked-open gecko egg where she stands. The blue hour lends a hazy, unreal sort of quality to the world; that distant shape could be a rock formation or a sleeping death claw, that hunched over scrub might have treasure buried at its roots, the cracked and broken asphalt of the road she's following now could be hiding land mines in any of its shadowed potholes. 

New Vegas is perfect, of course, her glorious hard-won home, and anyone who wants to take it from her had better be ready to kill her first. But spending every day in the shadow of those massive casinos can get tiring. And negotiating with NCR reps— _without_ letting show just how much she'd love to kick them all out and slam the city gates closed on their asses—is more tiring still. This is exactly what she needed to feel like herself again.

A cool morning breeze kicks up, ruffling her chin-length hair, and all of a sudden she can't hold it in anymore. The courier whirls around, kicking away bottlecap-sized fragments of road with the movement, and whirls to the closer of the two machines as she belts out with a voice like a dying brahmin's, "I've got _spuuurs_ , that jingle, jangle, jingle!"

There's a pause, the securitron's program sending for back-up when faced with stimulus it can't process, and then—

"Oh!" Yes Man says, screen flickering before giving way to a familiar face. "Is this trip a cover for a mental breakdown? Because if so, I should mention that I do have the full text of the RobCo Industries handbook for _Ensuring Employee Satisfaction and Physical and Emotional Health._ I'm told it's very useful for handling crises!"

"Sounds like someone's looking for an excuse not to sing. Come on, the next line's about rolling, it's perfect for you."

Yes Man's face is a static image. Somehow, that doesn't stop his smile from from becoming more pained. "You know, if House's recorded memories are correct, back in the quote-unquote good old days, if a CEO was acting irrationally the board of trustees could vote to have him removed!" He makes a vaguely shrug-like gesture with his oversized arms. "Not that I'd ever do something like that! No _matter_ how necessary it could hypothetically end up being!"

The courier laughs, delighted even after all this time. Rudest fucking robot in the whole entire Mojave, and he's right by her side.

She makes it through the rest of _Jingle Jangle Jingle_ , no thanks to Yes Man, and starts in on the rest of her repertoire; halfway through crooning _Where have you been all my life?_ , she hears a territorial hiss and realizes the noise has attracted wild animals. She raises her rifle, Yes Man's cannons hitch into a ready position—and it's on.

She shoots three geckos and a rabid brahmin by the time the sun sets, and dinner that night is spit-roasted meat with scales still on cooked to perfection over the open campfire. It's a good day.

\--

She arrives at the skeleton of the casino on her second day of travel, just as the sun's reaching its peak. Sweat drips down her scalp and across the back of her neck and her skin feels sanded raw from the grit in the air here. The Sierra Madre is a relief by comparison, even given everything that it represents. The winding paths leave vast swathes of shadow for her to shelter in. And, no matter the temperature outside the casino, the cobbled streets here always feel cold under her feet.

The two securitrons and their heavy cargo she leaves just outside the doors. They settle into a low-energy watch cycle, scanning the horizon, as she shoulders her own pack and makes her way in.

The blood-red cloud hangs thick over the casino, even now. The air tastes of iron and salt and the light filters through it weak and watery. It's quieter than she remembers; seems Christine has been as busy as her messages hinted at. Once or twice she passes the well-preserved remains of a ghost person with its limbs hacked off, but there's no rustling in the hallways beyond, no sharp scrape of a knife or labored gasping breathing that signals a living ghost person lurking nearby. The only thing left is the acrid scent of their slowly-rotting bodies, and it hangs heavy in the air.

(She tasted ghost person flesh once, not out of desperation or the terrible overwhelming _need_ that seems to drive the Mojave's cannibal tribes, but out of simple curiosity. Dog had told her of the strange taste of their meat, and she'd wondered—just how far from human could these creatures _really_ be? Surely they weren't so different under the suit?

She was new to the Sierra Madre then, and naive. Even now, the phantom taste of burnt plastic and battery acid sticks to her tongue whenever she passes a corpse.)

Another difference since she last saw this place: messages line the walls now, more frequent and more helpful than Dean's handprint-marked stashes. The courier knows where she's going—remembers this place better than the back of her hand, couldn't forget it if she tried—but even still it's nice to see the messages. They're signs of life. Like the trail markers couriers leave for each other out in the Mojave.

No words mark the walls. Writing, it seems, has been slow to return to Christine, if it will ever return at all. But there's arrows sketched out in ash with a confident hand and, here and there, messages left underneath in the same strange _dot-dot-dash_ cypher language that Christine speaks to her with over the radio. Easier to transmit than words, and it travels farther; it's a dead-useful sort of thing, one of the many pre-war inventions that the Brotherhood of Steel hoards jealously for itself. As if being able to transmit long-distance messages would cause the second destruction of society.

 _SAFETY_ , one means, with an arrow pointing in a direction the courier knows leads to a defensible alcove. _BEWARE_ , another, with a red-tinged X drawn on the doorway nearby. The ghost people haven't been cleared out of every nook and cranny yet.

It would make a nice distraction, to hunt a few down, but there's more important things to take care of today. She ignores the signs and heads instead for the great central casino. 

Vera's tomb. Father Elijah's tomb, too, and that's a much more pleasant thought.

It's a beautiful thing, as lonely and as empty as it is. Joshua, when she visits the Dead Horses, speaks sometimes of a city upon a hill, and this place can't be what he means but it's always what she imagines when he says it. (It's neither as big nor as bold as the Lucky 38, though. And there's no proper room service, either. She takes comfort in that.)

She slips into the lobby quietly, letting the hinges squeak shut behind her. Christine is nowhere to be see (probably she should've told warned her she was coming, but where's the fun in that?), but it's not long before she hears a distant sound. A woman's voice, echoing from not so far away. The courier follows the sound of it down the hall, across the thick dust-choked carpet, and emerges at the entrance of the Tampico to see—

Christine.

The neon sign that once showed Dean Domino's name has been torn down. The shattered wreck of it lies across the stage. Nearby, facing the faded curtain, Christine kneels on the floor. She has the parts for some sort of impossibly-complex-looking machine spread out in a halo around her, and she's singing to herself as she works on it. Vera Keyes' voice fills the air, ghostly and strange and impossibly beautiful.

It's a wonderful sound. (It also kinda makes her want to hunt Dean Domino down and punch him in his fucking throat, but she wants to do that pretty often anyway. Grimy bastard.)

"Every cold night has a sunrise," she croons, "and every drought a rain..."

She shouldn't interrupt. It would be absolutely rude to interrupt. But the courier wasn't the most subtle person even _before_ she allied herself to a robot whose primary emotions are psychotic glee and murderous glee, and so as Christine hits the chorus the courier chimes in, with her sandpaper-on-gecko-skin voice, "Let the bright tomorrow in, let the old sorrows not win—"

There's about half a second where the courier thinks, _Not my best move,_ and then Christine is on her feet in one fluid motion with a laser rifle aimed right between the courier's eyes.

Her finger squeezes on the trigger, her face draws into a tight scowl, her eyes search out the courier's shape in the gloom... and then she realizes, and drops the weapon to her side as she says, in a voice tight with relief, "You—what are you _doing_ here?"

The courier laughs, more out of sheer adrenaline than anything else, and steps forward. Her hands are still up defensively; it's a moment before she remembers to lower them. "Not getting shot, looks like! So that's good."

Christine stares at her a long, long moment before she sighs and slips her rifle back into a ragged-looking holster at her side. She doesn't look upset to see the courier, at least; a smile tugs at her suture scars as she shakes her head. 

"I should've guessed something was up," she says. "You haven't been answering my messages."

"Ah, well. Didn't want to ruin the surprise." 

The courier intends to offer Christine a handshake or a smile, something casual enough to fit two people who haven't seen each other in months, but instead as she draws close she finds herself pulling Christine into a fierce, desperate hug. Christine looks tired and ragged and worn thin, with deep bags under her eyes, but she also looks _alive_ in a way the courier has never seen from her before. The burden of long-denied revenge has finally fallen from her shoulders, and the woman who stands in front of her now is all the more vibrant for it.

She's beautiful. She always was, from the first moment they met, but now... _well_. The courier can't tell if it's an actual difference or if she just has more brainpower to devote to it now that she's not constantly worried about losing her fucking head, but either way it's impossible to ignore.

(Something about her arms, maybe. All that time trapped in the Auto-Doc had left Christine right on the edge of starvation. She's still worryingly thin, but she's at least gained back enough for the corded muscle of a Brotherhood-trained warrior to show through. She looks like the sort of woman who could throw the courier right through a wall, and that's never not been a turn on.)

"So," Christine says once they've finally broke apart, their embrace lingering just a moment too long to be casual, "I'm assuming you're not here to enjoy the resort." Her hands fly as she speaks, gesturing wildly; even with her voice back, she hasn't lost the habit of using every part of her body to talk. It's a delight to watch.

The courier snorts. "Not that gambling with holograms isn't _fun_ , but... not quite enough chaos for my tastes."

"Knowing you, I can imagine."

"Hey," the courier says, "offer's still on the table if you want to have some real fun. Open 24/7, rain and shine." They both know Christine won't take her up on the offer—the Sierra Madre is Christine's as much as the Lucky 38 is the courier's—but hope springs eternal. "But really, though, tempting as the spa package is in this place, I'm more here for the company." She grins. "Don't suppose you'd know of anyone willing to play host? I brought refreshments."

"Refreshments?" Christine asks, and then she realizes. "You _didn't_."

A shrug, a smile; there's a lot you can get away with if you go big enough and unapologetic enough. Admittedly, the courier's never had to try to _get away with_ offering someone food before, but she thinks her charms will work against Christine's pride just as easy as they work against anything else. "I might've had some extras lying around, you know?" she says. "Turns out there's only so many days in a row you can eat smoked brahmin before you want to up and beg for the sweet embrace of death."

"I told you I'm fine," Christine says, folding her arms against her chest. "Your own people—"

" _My own people_ are in the middle of the biggest tourism boom the city's seen since before the bombs dropped. City guards've been having to beat the trade caravans away with a stick." Very literally, actually, though only if they don't pay their solicitor's license fee. "We're going to be okay without a few crates of food."

Christine is quiet a moment, thinking it over. "I... don't need charity," she says. 

She wants to be convinced, the courier can tell; her self-imposed mission here is important enough and draining enough that she can't afford to turn down the help she's being offered. It's just the Brotherhood of Steel's obsession with self-sufficiency that holds her back.

Some things are hard to unlearn. The courier understands that. So she shrugs, and laughs, and says, "Hey, come on, it's not charity. It's a lottery."

"A lottery," Christine says flatly.

"Sure thing." The courier wiggles her fingers, pantomimes pulling a slip of paper out of a hat. "Drew your name myself, fair and square. All this could've gone to anyone."

That, at least, manages to pull a smile from Christine. "And how many names were in the running?"

"Hundreds," says the courier. " _Thousands_. The entire population west of the Colorado. You must have Sierra Madre luck running through your veins!"

Christine presses one hand to her face, shakes her head, and—for one glorious, beautiful second—actually laughs out loud. It's a lovely sound: the overwhelming battle-ready poise of a trained-from-birth soldier broken by sheer, unexpected humor. The courier's a little bit stunned to have been the cause of it.

"Well," Christine says finally, still smiling, "I guess if I won fair and square..."

The courier claps her hands together, grinning ear to ear. "Perfect! Wonderful! I knew we'd see eye to eye." She can't quite believe that worked.

"Bring whatever you've got into the casino, would you?" Christine asks. "I'm just going to finish a few things up."

The courier nods, and—moving quick, before common sense can take over—reaches out to pull into one more embrace, as tight as she can make it. Christine's arms come up around her in return, the muscles of her back firm and smooth under the courier's hands, and then they break apart in the same moment.

Christine is looking at her. There's a flush high on her cheeks.

"Be back soon!" the courier says, and makes her (suave, elegant) escape.

Once she's out of the casino doors, the courier spins herself in the first half-circle step of a half-remembered tribal dance. Did the Great Kahns teach it to her, or the Chairmen? She can't remember—fuck, she can barely remember the steps—but she dances it anyway, haphazardly, as she makes her way back down the street. She, at least, has never been shy about laughing, especially at herself.

If the ghost people want to come, let them come. Her knife arm could use a workout.

\---

No ghost people come to interfere, luckily and disappointingly. The courier collects the securitrons without incident, unloads their packages and stores them inside the Sierra Madre casino's cracked and broken kitchen before she returns to the central theater. Tonight's dinner is leftover gecko meat: Christine pulls a hot plate out from somewhere, and they grill it old-world style until the metal sizzles with grease. It's still bloody in the center when the courier pulls her hunk of shoulder off the heat, and the heavy iron taste is perfect against her tongue.

It's the radiation that makes it so good, she's sure. She almost pities the people of the old world sometimes—clean air might've been nice, from what Raul says, but there's so many things none of them ever got to experience.

After, the courier pries open one of the cans she's brought with the blade of her favorite knife, and she and Christine split a tin of pickled cactus fruits. She's always preferred hers fresh, but she watches Christine as she eats—the pure, easy happiness in her face, the way she wolfs down every bite and sucks the juices off each of her long fingers after—and thinks that this might be the best meal she's ever had.

After dinner, Christine stands. A smear of black grease runs down the side of her face; whatever she was working on when the courier interrupted her, it's clear she's been working on it a while. The halo of parts the courier saw spread out onstage earlier is gone now, though. Maybe she's finished. Maybe she just moved them—the courier's not one most people trust around small mechanical bits; she much prefers the sort of large mechanical bits that can make even larger organic bits explode.

"Can I show you something?" she asks. "I..." she pauses, laughs to herself. It's not the happy sound it was before. "I don't know that you'll like it. But I've been needing something to do, now that catching up on my reading's out of the question, and I guess I settled on this." She adds, more to herself than to the courier, "Didn't expect you'd be here to see it."

"Of course!" the courier says. "I'm sure it'll be amazing."

Christine gives the courier a quick nod. "Thank you. Really." She stands there a few seconds, gathering her courage, and then walks back towards the theater curtain and a bank of machinery nearby. It's the same place that she'd been working on her massive mechanical project earlier.

"It's taken a while to get some of the old systems working," she calls out to the courier as she bends down in front of one of the odd machines. "I wasn't sure, up until just recently, if I was really going to go through with it."

There's a soft click, the hiss of radio static—every muscle in the courier's body tenses at once, screaming for her to _run!_ —and then the formless noise resolves into something familiar.

There's no one on the stage. No hologram to croon out old tunes, repeat familiar words. But, from somewhere far away, Vera Keyes is singing.

 _Begin again in the night, let's sway again tonight_...

The soft sound of Christine's footsteps draws the courier from her awed trance. Christine stands only a few feet away from her. "Strange, right?" she says. "I wasn't planning to bring the radios back on, after everything that happened. But"—she shrugs—"fixing things is still something I can do. And I thought it might be nice to have some background noise around."

The courier knows how crushingly lonely it can get when you have nothing but the silence inside your skull for company. It makes her heart twist to imagine Christine being that alone.

"I think it's wonderful," she says, and then she holds out a hand. "Actually... can I show you something too?"

Christine looks at her a moment, probably—and not unfairly—wondering just what she has up her sleeve. But she reaches out fearlessly enough. And her fingers, when they intertwine with the courier's, are warm and rough with callouses.

It's an old world dance, technically, passed from House's memory banks to the tribes he reshaped in his image, and then along to her by a friendly Omerta one summer evening. It was meant to be danced to old world music, the woman who showed her the steps had told her, but not the sort of old world music that Mr. New Vegas played on the radio station. This sort of dance you needed _classy_ music for.

The courier's not sure this is what the Omerta had in mind, but she's also never heard a song so in need of being danced to before.

Christine picks up the slow, swaying steps easily enough, and after a few token protests—"I'm not in show business, you know, I'm not sure what kind of coordination you think I have"—she finds the rhythm of the music in the movement. The two of them step through the room one low, crooning note at a time, awkward at first and then surer. The courier's hand on Christine's back, Christine's on her shoulder... there's no ghost people here to interrupt them, no Elijah or Dean Domino. It's just Christine and the courier and the ghost of Vera Keyes.

When the dance ends, they're barely more than a hand's-breadth away from each other. The music dies down, Vera's voice fades out, and Christine says, "I..."

Her fingers brush the courier's cheek. She stares at her a moment, assessing, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. _The good old Brotherhood spirit,_ the courier thinks wryly, _overthink everything to death_. 

Lucky for Christine, then, that one of them here knows how not to think too much. The courier dips down, leans in, and kisses Christine.

Christine makes a noise deep in her throat and clutches at the front of the courier's shirt. "Upstairs?" she asks.

Upstairs it is.

\---

It's Vera Keyes' room they head to, half-stumbling, stopping every few minutes to press each other up against the closest wall. The courier gets one quick glance about—Vera's rocking chair in the corner of the room, Vera's words scrawled above the headboard, Christine's spare weapons spread across the room in various states of disassembly and Christine's hand-drawn maps of the Sierra Madre pinned to the walls—before Christine knocks her backwards. The courier tangles around her as she goes down, and together the two of them kick up a cloud of dust as they fall into bed.

Before the courier can react, Christine gets one hand around both of her wrists and brings them up above her head. The courier thrashes a moment, trying to break the hold simply for the sheer pleasure of knowing she won't be able to. Finally, she gives up in favor of staring up at Christine with a smile.

"Oh no," she says flatly, "I'm caught. Whatever will I do?"

Christine gives her a roll of her eyes in return, and then—much more pleasant—presses her down into the bed and kisses her in earnest.

They're not gentle. Maybe they should be. It's their first time together, they've been reunited after so long... but the courier's never had much patience for tenderness, and she suspects Christine's the same. Adrenaline is what she lives for, in bed as much as on the battlefield. They tear at each other's clothes and leave scratches on each other's skin as they move together.

Christine's body is covered in scars; precise surgical lines mix with rougher, jagged-edges battle marks as the courier lets her hands drift lower. She traces them with her fingers and then, later with her mouth, dips her head until she's kneeling between Christine's spread legs.

"Come on," Christine says, heat burning in her eyes, and the courier grins like a deathclaw before she lowers her head to lick a warm, wet stripe across Christine's cunt.

She tastes amazing, salty and slick, and—well, the courier's never struggled when it comes to making sure everyone has a good time. 

After, they curl up next to each other. Dust hangs heavy in the air. Outside, night has fallen, and the room feels strangely still. Christine's rough breathing is a sound as familiar as the courier's own heartbeat; it was the only thing she had to check Christine's safety by, back before Christine regained her voice. She wants to hold her tight and not let her go.

The courier knows how much Christine's mission means to her. Knows how laser-fixated Christine is in everything she does; it's one of her most admirable qualities, and also her most aggravating. 

The courier also knows when it's time to test her luck.

“You really should come back with me sometime,” the courier says, tracing the line of a scar down across Christine’s shoulder. “Not forever, but... at least a visit, you know? There’s no way you got to enjoy the Mojave properly while you were still with the Brotherhood.” It’s so easy to imagine, too—New Vegas is full of things that Christine would love, things the Brotherhood would destroy if they could. “We could go the top of the dam, eat at the Ultra-Luxe, play a round of whack-a-claw…”

“...Whack-a-claw?”

The courier grins as the memories come flooding back. “Gun Runners taught me how to play. You take a good knife, or a set of brass knuckles, out into the quarry south of New Vegas with you, and _pow_!” The courier mimes a vicious left hook at the empty air. “You don’t have to actually kill it, you win if you’re still alive fifteen minutes later.”

“You’re messing with me,” Christine says. She shakes her head, props herself up on her elbows just so she can stare at the courier a little more easily. “No one would ever do that.”

“I’m not!” The courier scowls, offended. “It’s a great game if you’re quick on your feet.”

Christine keeps staring at her for a long, long time, searching her face. Whatever she finds there makes her press a hand against her face and sigh deeply. “How did we ever survive this place?”

“Luck, mostly.”

It’s the truth, and it also makes Christine laugh. The courier grins back at her when she smiles. “I guess so. Luck and violence. So long as it works, right?"

"Exactly." Luck and violence are two of the three legs of the courier's problem-solving strategy, the other being 'bullshitting wildly'. They haven't served her wrong yet.

Christine's silent a while, dragging her fingers through the courier's choppy hair. Finally, she says, "The weather's going to cool down soon enough."

"That's true," the courier says, confused.

"And when it does... well, Elijah's records say the ghost people are more sluggish when it's cold. They could probably keep to themselves for a weekend without me keeping them in check. So..."

The courier wants to jump out of bed and dance around the room. She wants to pull Christine back down and go for round two. But she knows what this means to her, and so all the courier does is give her a smile and say, "I'll be looking forward to it."

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from [, the Vera Keyes song that Obsidian turned into a real-life song.](http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Begin_Again)


End file.
